Category Archives: How To

You wouldn’t open a shop and just expect customers to find you. The same applies to producing a website – once you’ve done all the hard work of design, development and content creation, you need to tell your audience where to find you.

When you’re developing your communication strategy for your business you need to include a range of media channels to let your customers know where you are, what you offer and tell them why they should purchase from you.

So as well as traditional media such as advertising, direct mail etc, you also need to include SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) as part of your communication strategy.

I’ll leave a more indepth discussion of SEO to the experts but put simply, it’s about ensuring that your website is amongst the most popular in your category. SEO takes time, and therefore money, but the search results are what’s called “organic” so have a more trustworthy reputation in your audience’s eyes.

SEM is is about paid search engine marketing, where you purchase ads on Google that …

Every now and again some smart company, in this case it’s Sprinklr, sets out to tackle a major topical issue and use content marketing to spread the word…the issue in this case is best practices and scalability for Social Media at a global level .

To achieve this, they approached an amazing group of thought leaders..some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting personally or online over the years. This is social media’s ‘A Team.’

Whilst the document has an enterprise/global focus, there is much to be gleaned for every business and organisation.

I’m often asked the ‘how much should I spend on my marketing budget?’ question….and my response is always…well it depends.

The bottom line is that the marketing budget for your business is not something that can easily be determined by a formula. Spending on marketing support varies widely, with industry commentators estimating that most companies spend between 2% to 4% or 22% to 25 % of gross revenues depending on the business model.

So if you’re sitting down to plan your marketing budget, here’s some points to consider.

What are your goals? Stating the obvious – until you define your goals, there’s really no logical way to establish a marketing budget. You will need to have a well defined marketing strategy with measurable objectives.

% of gross revenue If a company has aggressive goals for increasing revenues, then establishing the marketing budget as a ratio of the revenue goal makes sense. Reducing marketing spending is likely to reduce the acquisition of new customers or even jeopardise the company’s current market share. Companies that have plans to grow rapidly generally need to spend a …

We still come across companies that have jumped into social media without a clear plan. Most times they’ve registered a few social profiles and then hit what I like to call…’the Great Silence.’ So where do you start? I always work through this checklist when I first sit down with clients.

It’s important to establish that social media is not a ‘quick-fix’ strategy, it’s a fundamental shift in the way that companies and organisations now relate to their audiences.

What are the Social Media outcomes you expect? It’s now universally accepted that Social Media can…

Back in March Google launched their Social Reports. The new reports aimed to bridge the gap between social media and business metrics – ‘allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business.’GA’s Social Reports are designed to:

Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs) Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing program “ There’s lots of useful reports that can be generated though one of the most interesting for me is the Social Sources Report. Why?.. because it identifies the networks and communities visitors are using to engage with your content and then lets you see how people interact based on where they came from. Marketers can use the Social Sources report to understand which networks deliver ROI and get an idea of the content that should be created for each. I came …

Google has been hard at work on its search algorithm…real cat amongst the SEO pigeons. Google started rolling out ‘Semantic Search’ back in May this year and the changes have kept coming. The idea behind ‘the Knowledge Graph’ is for search engines to think more like a human… Google “understands real-world entities and their relationship to one another: things, not strings.”

Personally I’m delighted with the changes…no more key word stuffing ..no more dodgy backlinks…no more people telling me ‘I can get a million (useless/irrelevant) links in some exotic backwater for next to nothing.’

It’s not hard to understand why many businesses get frustrated with search engine optimization. It’s a blend of art, science and technology and to many firms a daunting task. A Californian mate of mine, Lee Traupel of the Linkedmedia Group put this useful SEO How To Guide together that will give you a good snapshot of basic search engine optimization processes.

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Wolff is a full service agency connecting brand, design and marketing.
We’ve got a totally fresh approach to creative, strategy and design. We like to look at things a little bit differently, approach them from the other side, find the unexpected.